Madlib is featured in 5 pages of the latest Electronic Beats magazine from Germany, interviewed by Thomas Fehlmann of The Orb during Madlib’s recent trip to Europe. Excerpt below.

Madlib: Thomas, just so you know: I’m a man of few words.Thomas Fehlmann: The last big interview I read with you was in Wire a few years back. My good friend and former fellow band member Moritz von Oswald was on the cover just a few months before that. Back in the day we played together in Palais Schaumburg. Have you heard the new album Fetch he did with his trio? It’s really impressive, very jazzy, electronic, and very eclectic.

M: No, I haven’t. I actually don’t know much about new music, really.TF: Well, Palais Schaumburg is old school. And pretty experimental. Early eighties. We started playing live again last year for our thirty year anniversary. I played–and still play–live synth and trumpet through an echoplex. The lyrics are all in German and very Dada.

M: Oh, I’d love to hear it. Trumpet through an echoplex, huh?TF: Yes, it’s pretty free, apart from an occasional riff, although our music is mostly structured around a danceable beat. It seems to me that generally speaking, European music is obsessed with rhythms in 4/4, particularly today’s dance music. Do you think this is a continental phenomena or what’s your take on straight rhythms?

M: Well, funk is 4/4. It’s so you can dance to it. Although, shit, I could dance to 5/8. It’s all music.TF: I hear you. What have you been up to since coming to Berlin?

M: Just drinking wine, chilling with Embryo and relaxing. I’m sure you know that Embryo is a musical collective from Munich that started out in the seventies. They make pretty eclectic krautrock, working a lot with jazz musicians and world music and whatnot.TF: Have you guys been rehearsing?

M: No, just listening to some of the stuff we recorded last time, around five hours of tape.TF: But you’ll also be playing a show in Berlin later this year. I actually penned that into my calendar before I knew that I would be meeting you for this conversation.

M: Hey man, bring your trumpet to the show.TF: How did you know about Embryo? Crate digging?

M: Actually from touring. I’d been coming out to Berlin since 2001, and I’ve been learning about different types of music. Krautrock is certainly one of my favorites.TF: Have you checked out Can’s Lost Tapes?

M: Yup, I picked it up almost immediately when it came out. There are some absolutely brilliant tracks on there. Honestly, Can are one of my all-time favorites. I actually played with Jaki [Liebezeit] with the Brasilintime cats.TF: He also has this brilliant project with Bernd Friedmann. It’s so cool that Jaki’s so persistent about working with all types of artists.

M: Yeah, he’s very open-minded.TF: Have you gone record shopping in Berlin yet?

M: Actually, no. Nobody’s told me where the stores are at.TF: Well, you should start with Hard Wax. It’s not your average shop. The people who work there and run it have very strong opinions about what they carry. There’s also a legendary cutting room there where they master the records for lots of international producers. Unfortunately, they don’t carry that much hip-hop anymore. . .

M: I never buy hip-hop records.TF: They also have quite a selection of African music, which recently started to blow up a bit. This grew out of the whole reggae and dub wave, and it sits quite well with the broader stream of contemporary releases. I find some of it is very psychedelic.

M:I love psychedelic stuff. That’s my era.TF: Is that what you grew up listening to with your parents?

M:My parents were incredibly open-minded. They had everything from James Brown to Kraftwerk, and I had a record player in my room, so I would always steal their stuff and listen to it on my own.TF: You’re lucky. I had to fight with my parents to play what I liked and to get my turn at the record player. Eventually when they got a stereo, I was allowed to set up the old mono system in the basement for my use.

M:That’s how I first learned about music. Back then music was a different feeling. These days everybody follows trends. I honestly think things were far more open-minded back then. People tried harder, and there was more of a spiritual aspect involved . . .TF: It’s maybe surprising, but I think music with a spiritual angle is the music that really endures.

M:I also like my music loose. Quantized is cool, but I also like that human feel.TF: I think the humanness is what separates your productions from things done within the grid . . .

M:Well, I like that stuff too.TF: I remember when I picked up the first Yesterdays New Quintet record–one of your many aliases–I was so impressed. I mean, a lot of people say they like jazz, but actually doing it is another thing. Of course, I’d been listening to you since back in the day with Lootpack.

M:It’s an honor for me to hear that. Actually, Yesterdays New Quintet was my first shot at jazz. Sometimes, I kind of feel like a musical schizophrenic, to be honest. But I think that’s probably not a bad thing.TF: I know what you mean; trytrying to absorb all the magic stuff one is passionate for. The new Orb album we did with Lee Perry, The Observer In The Star House, was also a first for us in many ways. He actually spent a week with us in the countryside near Berlin. We had to be ready when he was ready to flow and that was basically always. He had a tremendous hunger for new beats. We needed to be fast, have all the machines and beats ready at any time. Lee also had a buddy with him, and he told us that usually after around two days, Lee gets bored with whatever he’s doing . . . but he stayed for the full week. This is the album [shows cover].

M:[turning it over] Ah, Steve Reich samples.TF: Had to get permission for those.

M:Of course!TF: As I mentioned before, I’ve been following you for quite some time. I decided to take a picture of all your records that I own. [showing collection pic] I’m not as prolific as you are but there are similarities, I also make lots of my music from my record collection, mostly older stuff.

M:Got to come back to stuff that people missed.TF: I tend to treat my samples quite a bit, but it’s a similar flow in that existing music is the foundation and main source for the artistic result. That’s not to say that some of it can’t get pretty radical . . .

M:Even if it doesn’t sell, right? That’s some of the best stuff!TF: When I see your work, I can look at it as if the idea of using your record collection to make music is a kind of conceptual art: the cultural output of society as the source material, put through the filter of your mind and your sampler. What about the other cultures that you explore in your music–non- Western conceptions of pop?

M:It’s all music that was done through records I bought–not visits to India or the Middle East or whatever. But I did manage to pick up the records from all over the world. The Internet for me has been a help in finding material, but it’s actually something I just started using. I’m not constantly listening to streams or anything like that. We used to have tons of record stores where I live, but they’re disappearing one by one.TF: Tell me about it! How important is the artwork for your records?

M:Well, it has to fit. A lot of the artwork just comes from pictures in my room or whatever. Like the Quasimoto album with the Frank Zappa bubble . . . This is stuff I look at all the time and surrounds me. I was living with Jeff Jankrub who does all the artwork, and we just listened to tons of Zappa.TF: When I was a teenager I used to go to Zappa concerts when he was playing with Ruth Underwood and George Duke.

M:You got to love Zappa and Beefheart, The GTOs, Wild Man Fischer and George Duke . . . Zappa made me study all that stuff even more.TF: Don’t forget Var

bought that magazine today , nice stuff.
also has a CD to it, but the Madlib song on there (Gold Jungle) is from the Beat Konducta 1, wish they had gotten some rare new jam from him but whatever. still a good read (btw currently the transcript here covers every page from the interview but the last)

Damn this wack a$$ interviewer!!! How many times will you REALLy get to interview someone mystic and prolific ad Madlib?!!! Horrible questions!!! he was too busy talking about his work that NO-ONE GIVES A SH!T ABOUT!! UGH!!!!

Damn this wack a$$ interviewer!!! How many times will you REALLY get to interview someone mystic and prolific as Madlib?!!! Horrible questions!!! He was too busy talking about his work that NO-ONE GIVES A SH!T ABOUT!! UGH!!!!

When I initially commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get several e-mails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove people from that service?